


An age at least for every part

by EmilyArmadillo



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon Rewrite, Canonical Character Death, Love/Hate Relationship, Multi, Sad Ending, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:15:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28652595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilyArmadillo/pseuds/EmilyArmadillo
Summary: The Doctor and the Master as soulmates. Spans seasons 3 through 10.
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27





	An age at least for every part

"Do your people have soulmates?"

They've just returned to the Tardis after meeting Shakespeare, and the Doctor has just found a place to store some captured witches. "What, sorry?" He says mildly. Martha repeats the question. The Doctor supposes he should expect it, a clever medical student like Martha learns you have two hearts, next she'll want to know what other ways your species are different. Humans have one heart each, and when they touch their soulmate for the first time a colorful tattoo is left on the skin of both people. So what about Time Lords?

"Yep. Almost all species do, isn't that incredible? Across the whole universe, all different species-" and he prattles on about the wonder of sharing this commonality with all beings; that everyone has someone whose life is intertwined with theirs. He doesn't not believe it, but it also works well as a distraction to avoid the natural next question.

The answer would be yes. Yes, he knew who his was. He had felt the shivering electricity as they touched for the first time, as blue and pink and purple pigments rose to the surface of both of their skins. More than once in fact. Regeneration cleared the marks, allowed for a second first time. And third. And more. And if the Doctor didn't want to explain to Martha how it was that he knew his soulmate despite the clarity of this body's skin, well then, a flight to the future might take her mind off such questions.

* * *

He thinks that this body would always be clear, and the next one, and the next one. That his soulmate is lost forever. But, the universe continually surprises him. Or, at least, the Master does.

* * *

Professor Yana regenerates into a fresh, new body, and there they stand, on either side of the Tardis doors, unmarked but bound together all the same. It hardly matters that the Master flies away, because this is the truth of it: soulmates are what people call it when two beings' timelines were woven so closely together that they could never be teased apart. The Gallifreyan word for it is more technical, meaning same-scar-in-time. Two people, one rend of in reality. Of course they'll find each other again.

"What is he to you?" Martha asks. "Like a colleague or..."

"A friend, at first," the Doctor says. It's true. But it's not. They were never just classmates. They were always a pair of binary stars. The Doctor doesn't say this.

They follow the Master onto the Valiant and bear witness to the chaos he creates.

"The Toclafane. What are they," the Doctor demands, only shakily holding his weak, aged body off the floor. "Who are they."

The Master crouches down close to him, and straightens the Doctor's jacket with his fingers. "Doctor, if I told you the truth..." Suddenly, he grips the Doctor's shirt and rips it open, sending buttons flying. "Your hearts would break." And the Master presses his hand to the Doctor's chest right over where his hearts beat. Both of them suck in air as they feel their new marks surface, a tingling, sparking feeling. The Master's: dark swirls of color covering is palm and fingerpads, as if he was an overenthusiastic finger painter. The Doctor's: a perfect, five-fingered handprint branding his elderly chest.

The Master waves to the room, wiggling his fingers so all can see the new mark. Most looked confused, Lucy giggles, but most delightfully, the Master gets to watch all of the blood drain from Jack's and Martha's faces.

Martha kneels next to the Doctor as the Master begins to end the world. There's no time for her to ask how this could be, or why he didn't tell her. There's no time for his apologies.

One year later, the Doctor is renewed, and in a way Martha does understand why he holds the Master and forgives him. And why he insists the Master is not to be executed for his crimes. And why, when Lucy's bullet enters the Master's chest, the Doctor cradles him in his arms. The Doctor sobs because he's the last one, but even more so because he's incomplete. Losing a soulmate is painful, physically, whether the pair is in love or in a fight. In the 21st century there are no human remedies for the burning pain in the heart when your marked one died. Martha hopes the Time Lords had a cure for what the Doctor must feel in both of his.

* * *

When the Master is resurrected, the Doctor runs after him. This new Master has the same face, but is raw, like a stripped wire. His hair is white now, his skin thin. His hand clear. "Look at us now," he says, and that about sums it up. The two sons if Gallifrey kneel in the dirt and ash and one tells the other of the noise in his head.

"Please listen." The Master touches their foreheads together and holds the Doctor's face, electricity buzzing between them that has nothing to do with the lightning of the Master's new form. His marks appear: ink on his fingertips, a circle on his forehead. And the Doctor's, an addition to the stamp that is still over his hearts: five dots on each cheek and a matching mark centered above his eyes. The Doctor jumps back, but not from the contact. From the beating drums.

All of humanity becomes the Master except for this, the marks that the real Master has that no one else does, the ones that show he's the original. He ties up the Doctor, covers his mouth, and covers his forehead.

The Doctor thinks the Master is going to kill him. Wilf thinks the Doctor should kill him first. "Don't you dare put him before them," Wilf commands the Doctor, "I don't care if he is your soulmate- I did notice you came back marked after you went to see him- sometimes soulmates are rubbish. There are people who matter more. Now you take this gun and save your life." Against his instincts, the Doctor takes the weapon.

Rassilon looks down upon Gallifrey's wayward sons in disgust, unable to say which has corrupted the other. The Doctor points his weapon at the Lord President, at the Master, back at the President, but even touched by and marked with the Master's madness he would not shoot. He shoots the diamond instead and in that moment the two of them, Doctor and Master are united against the Lord President, his Final Sanction, and their whole world.

It feels familiar, this, losing his world, losing the Master too. Even losing his life is something he's had practice with. Still, he doesn't want to go. He burns, and the Tardis does with him, and a moment later he's staggering on unfamiliar legs, looking at unfamiliar arms, hands, fingers. He pulls up his ragged shirt and his chest over his hearts is bare, as he knew it would be. He crashes down to Earth a new man.

* * *

"Doctor," Amy asks him once, "do you have a soulmate?"

"Hey, look at THAT!"

This Doctor's misdirections are not as subtle.

* * *

The Doctor leans his cheek against the wall just next to the crack from which the Question rings out around him. He thinks about the his planet in another universe, and the spaceships in this universe ready to destroy it should he let it through. Though he doesn't mean to, he thinks also of his soulmate, maybe standing in the red grasses right now, head tilted to the sky. Inches away and a universe apart. He can't- they can't come back. For hundreds of years, the Doctor makes sure of it.

* * *

This is Missy's favorite part- everything coming together, the Doctor stumbling in ten steps behind. He'll figure it out. When she wants him to.

They meet face-to-face in the 3W institute and she almost snogs his stupid grumpy face right then but, no, mustn't spoil the game. The cat can't kill her mouse too quickly.

"I am maintained by my heart," she says. Her gloved hands place the Doctor's hand over her clothed chest. She looks into his eyes. Does he feel them? Does he remember when she marked him just like this?

"Who maintains your heart?"

"My heart is maintained by the Doctor."

"Doctor who?"

The moment passes. If her soulmate is too thick to get there, she'll lead him to the answer soon enough. And she has a lovely reunion present.

His face when she says her name, _Mistress_ , is delightful. The Doctor's hearts thrum as loudly as the cybermen's feet on the pavement. 'Always,' he thinks faintly, 'they always come back.' He can feel his skin tingle where he's been marked before; head and heart, and other places from longer ago.

They get on a plane and off a plane and into a graveyard and Missy's quite enjoying herself. Then she decides, this is the moment. She's taken her gloves off.

"Happy birthday, Mister President." She gives him the cyber-controller bracelet and their skin touches. She gasps dramatically as the mark comes to the skin of her fingers. On the Doctor, the mark circles around his wrist, like a cuff. A shackle binding him to her.

"Tiny bit pleased?" She asks. He's not one to graciously accept gifts, but she'll make him understand. He rips off the bracelet suddenly, violently, but that doesn't change what's on his wrist.

"I need you to know we're not so different. You and I, Doctor, we're meant to be." She waves her marked fingers in the air, and is mildly disappointed that Clara is too distracted with her cyber-boyfriend to make a funny horrified face. "I need my friend back," she tells the Doctor. "I need my soulmate back."

When he kisses her gently, she wonders if this is what it feels like to win.

But, no. He's off on another one of his speeches. "Love is a promise," he says. Missy raises her eyebrows at the idiot. 'And what,' she wonders, 'about your promise to me?'

Cyber-boyfriend was more than he appeared, she'll give him that. But Clara is just what she expected: commanding. Hard. She holds the disintegrator towards Missy with determination. The Doctor stays her hand.

"Old friend, is she?" Clara spits out. "Your soulmate, Doctor? If you have ever let this creature live, everything that happened today is on you." Missy is terribly proud of them both when the Doctor takes the device from Clara and aims at Missy himself.

"You win," he says.

"I know," she says.

Missy disintegrates, and the Doctor goes to tend to Kate. It keeps him from dwelling on the feeling in his hearts. The surety that she is not dead.

* * *

"The Last Will and Testament of the Time Lord known as the Doctor, to be delivered, according to ancient tradition, to his soulmate, on the eve of his final day."

"And that's you, isn't it," Clara says evenly. "So what do you need me for. You came here for my help."

"Because the Doctor is in danger."

Missy never wanted to receive the Doctor's confession like this. If something is going to end him, it should be her. Will be her. Despite the circumstances, she's a little pleased with the venue he's chosen.

"It's the wicked stepmother!" the Doctor says. "Everybody, hiss!" Missy smirks.

She holds up his confession dial in her fingers, and her marks are as dark as wine. He avoids the subject, and her eyes, yet she detects something in them. A slight gladness that she was there.

Later, when they're alone, Clara asks her testily, "How can you and the Doctor be soulmates?"

"Why shouldn't we be?" Missy answers.

"You spend all your time fighting."

"That's our texting. We've been at it for ages. Try, nano-brain, to contemplate soulmates. A bond older than your civilization and infinitely more complex."

When Clara's sealed in the Dalek casing, Missy places a gun in the Doctor's hand in much the way she fitted the cyber-controller around his wrist. Her fingers around him. Like before, he won't take her gift. "Run," he tells her.

"It wasn't me who ran, Doctor." She wiggles her fingers in farewell. "That was always you."

* * *

"Apologies for our choice, but your people are not easy to come by," Missy's executioner tells the Doctor.

That's true. It's just the two of them.

"Oh! Doctor! I didn't expect you," Missy tells the Doctor.

That's a lie. It's always the two of them.

"Your misses wouldn't approve," Nardole tells the Doctor.

That's true. River would expect the best of him. How much simpler his life would be if he were bound to the other woman he loved instead of this one.

"I know I'm going to die," Missy tells the Doctor.

Lie.

"I am your friend," she says. "I am your soulmate."

True.

* * *

She's crying in his Tardis. Neither of them knows why. Maybe it's some devious plan. Maybe it isn't.

"The alternative," the Doctor says, "is that this is for real, and it's time for us to become… friends, again."

"Friends? Is that all?" Missy questions.

The Doctor takes her hands gently. Neither of them circles the other's hands like a shackle. Neither of them squeezes too tightly. They just hold each other.

This is the trouble with hope.

* * *

"She's different," the Doctor says.

Bill presses him, "Different how?"

"I don't know."

Bill knows him better than that. "Yes, you do," she argues.

The Doctor sighs. "She's the only person that I've ever met who's even remotely like me," he says.

On the other side of the room, Nardole catches Bill's eye. He points to the Doctor and then at his own wrist, and then nods significantly. Bill understands.

"She's your soulmate, isn't she?" she asks, aware that the Doctor has a mark on his wrist about which he never answers questions.

The Doctor shoots an accusatory look at Nardole, who doesn't look sorry.

"That's why you need her to be good."

He knows he can help her. He tries to explain it: their childhood friendship, their attraction. The friction between the traveler and the arsonist. All the stars they had wanted to visit, and all of the beauty she was blind to, that would change her if she would just see.

"You're a bloody idiot. You know that, yeah?" Bill asks.

"Of course." No question about it. But he can't stop hoping, and he won't stop trying. There's no quitting the Mistress. Because however long the Doctor lives, so will she. They'll always be a part of each other, and their lives will always collide. All they need to do is find a way to not let it destroy them.

* * *

"He'll never set you free," the weird man says, and if Missy weren't so annoyed, she'd be amused. What a strange thing to say. Of course she would never be free of him, and he would never be free of her. That's what the mark of her fingers means, and what the mark on her last body's forehead meant, and before that on her hand, and on and back thousands of years. There is gravity, electromagnetism, and the two of them.

He pulls of his mask and reveals the white-blond hair and her own old face. And the mark, of course. The circle on his forehead.

The three of them do make a pair. The Doctor says everywhere there's people there's cybermen. There's another truth on this rooftop; every time there's the Doctor and the Master, there's betrayal. Missy has to join the Master and betray the Doctor, or she must betray herself. It's not an easy choice; she stands between the only two people she's ever loved.

Only one of them loves her back.

What Missy hadn't intended when she touched the Doctor's wrist in the graveyard was that for the rest of this life, his marks would guide her hands. When she holds her weapon, through them he holds it with her.

She knocks herself out.

The Doctor asks both of her what they would die for. The younger Master can't think of anything. He's free in a way Missy isn't. He holds marks from the Doctor, but only from a long time ago. Missy is the one bound to him here, and now.

"Stand with me. It's all I've ever wanted," the Doctor says.

'Every time you leave I don't know how to bear it. Even when it's me telling you to go, I want more than anything for you to stay. For you to let yourself be someone who can stay. Please,' the Doctor doesn't say. She hears it somehow, anyway.

"Me too," she says, to all of it. She takes his hand and thanks him. She lets go and leaves him.

When she holds her weapon, he holds it with her. She kills who she used to be, and she tells him why.

"It's where we've always been going. Thousands of years we've been orbiting each other and you've never admitted it to yourself. We aren't soulmates because we're meant to be his enemy, or because one of us has to win. It's because the only place in the universe we can feel at peace is at his side. The only chance we have to be complete- and his only chance, too- is together. That's what's happening today, dear. For all his faults, he is the place I belong. It's time to stand _with_ the Doctor."

She never does stand with him. She falls in the grass.

A cyberman blasts the Doctor's chest. He's dying. But somehow this is worse: his hearts falling as surely as if they were caught in the black hole's superman gravity. Missy is dead. He doesn't know how. He only knows that soon, he will follow.


End file.
